I used to think – only half seriously — that there was a genetic link between bipolar and creativity. One element of the theory made my friends with biology training laugh out loud.

My idea was that so many people with bipolar are also very creative, and bipolar is a genetic disease. So creativity must be nature’s way of helping some people with the bipolar gene live long enough to reproduce. “Live long enough to reproduce” is what made biologists laugh, an essential principle in biology absurdly applied.